"WHAT SOME CALL ADDICTION I CALL ENTHUSIASM"

This quote is from Shewho. I know. She seems like the last one to say such a thing. This classic gem was uttered in response to my ragging her about her growing dependency on marijuana edibles. What i call dependency she calls bullshit. Recently i have been ordering up a couple of laced energy bars and little pies along with my monthly eye medicine. Although Shewho doesn't smoke, I'd hate to come between her and her edibles. Enthusiasm is putting it mildly.
   Unlike Shewho, I do have my addictions.  They go way beyond enthusiasm, right over to dependency. I gotta have my beer. I gotta have my pot. I gotta hunt deer and turkey. I gotta make art and obviously i gotta blab all about it. I know a lot of workaholics. But that's one addiction I seem to have in check.  Oh, and I gotta have my facebook. Pick your poisons, I say.
   HWS has been silent of late. I had my reasons. The bad leg got better, only to be replaced by a debilitating bummer of a depression, along with a hot run of prolific production. You'd think the ability to crank out work would release me from the head disease, but that's not always the way it works. In fact, puking out a couple of hundred drawings, with no show venue, only seemed to make it worse.  That's why i stopped writing the blog.  My face turned to stone. My eyes had that 1000 yard gaze. Even the cats knew better than to get close. I figured nobody needed to hear me bellyache.
    Shewho came back from London only to be greeted by my sourpuss. While she was away I'd hunkered down at WSSP, working and watching HULU. Now that she was home I knew I had to get out of the house (at least during the day), for both our sakes. So began my routine of driving back the shack in Glen Wild, starting a fire on the porch, taking a crap in the freezing cold outhouse, and working all day there. For drinking water I tapped my maple tree and rigged a plastic bottle under the spout. I'd draw little drawings, photograph them and immediately put them up on facebook. It was the 17th meets the 21st Century and I felt like shit. Back to addiction.
    For some reason all i have to do is sign up for social media and I'm instantly hooked. After leaving facebook for about a year (for the same reason), after deer season was done in Dec., i went back on. At first it was cool. But it didn't take long before i was plastering posts and expecting responses. It was as insidious as it always was. I couldn't check my email without hitting "f". And I couldn't check myself. I could not refrain from putting up work incessantly. If I didn't have a "like" or a "comment" in the upper right, soon after a posting, I felt dejected. If I did.....I never had enough. Why am I so susceptible to these needy, negative emotions? I have no clue. I didn't have enough "friends". I wasn't clever enough in my "comments". And obviously my work wasn't good enough to garner the proper amount of attention. I was spiraling out of control. Then about 2 weeks ago I quit.

  Maybe it was the maple water, or the promise of Spring, Shewho being back, or my leg feeling better, but slowly the fog lifted. Nothing had really changed. The reasons I had for being depressed were still there in all their "stump the experts" glory. All, except for one. I was no longer on facebook. And now that 14 days has passed they promise to delete my page. I was proud of myself. I'd done it again, cold turkey. Sure I'll lose those readers too lazy to put HWS on their favorites list, relying on fb to tell them when I write something new, but wtf. To those of you that are my loyal little HWS family, on fb or not, I'm back. I feel better. Opening day for turkey in one month. As I write this it's snowing like a motherfucker. Shewho's in Venice and I'm back at the shack. Hopefully my enthusiasm with prevail. Don't worry darlin', I haven't touched that energy bar in the freezer. xx